Improv

An interlocutor told me about an hour ago that “most academics everywhere are atheists.” Eh what? I thought. In the UK and Sweden and fortunate places like that, no doubt, but in the US? Which is what we were talking about (via my post on that Catholofascist article in Crisis yesterday). Most academics in the US are atheists? Yeah I don’t think so. Given that most colleges and “universities” in the US are, shall we say, non-elite, and that most teaching is in vocational subjects (most degrees are in Business), I don’t think so.

Rilly? I said. Do you know that? Any stats?

She gave the stats for philosophers. Not going to fall for that, was I! I knew about those stats; I wrote them up for an issue of TPM whenever it was. I wasn’t asking about philosophers, I was asking about academics. My interlocutor said as far as she knew “in every discipline religious believers are in a minority.” So I looked it up.

…researchers at the Harvard Divinity School recently implemented a study to determine the religiosity of college and university professors around the country.The study, entitled “How religious are America’s college and university professors?,” has been circulating throughout academia since last year…

The study found that 23.4 percent of college and university professors describe themselves as either atheists or agnostics, with the remainder reporting some level of belief in God or another higher power.

23.4%, including agnostics as well as atheists. Not quite “most are atheists.”

Good for you! This is an oft-repeated claim. Many people would have just accepted an idea that conforms to the way they want the world to be and not asked for evidence. A good sign of rigor and intellectual integrity! I’m not surprised but I am delighted.

Wull James that’s kind of you but I’m not sure it illustrates my integrity so much as my already-existing awareness that the US is fulla religion (and that most academics aren’t at Harvard, to put it mildly). I mean it wasn’t even a matter of second-guessing something I’d like to believe – it just hit my incredulity gong way too instantly for that. Bonnnnnnngggggggg – that ain’t right.

Even in the best of the broad social science surveys, such as the American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS), there is considerable imprecision about what portion of the “no religion / none” demographic consists of self-identifying atheists, closeted atheists, and agnostics, and what portion consists of lapsed or disaffected former churchgoers, deists, New Age mysterians, faitheists, believers in belief, and NRBSs (not-religious-but-spiritual).

It would be wonderful data if the U.S. Census could gather information, household by household, about religious belief (or the lack thereof) and religious participation, but I suspect that long ago, someone in the federal government concluded that it would violate the Free Exercise Clause to ask such questions.

In academia, the percentages of atheists and agnostics may well be larger in numerical terms, but the same muddiness or imprecision exists in how professors are pigeonholed. I don’t put much stock in any of those numbers; they could easily be off by 75 or 100 percent.

For all we know, maybe majority of academics really are atheists — but with all the problems inherent in self-reporting, partly stemming from the widespread antipathy toward atheism (and simple fear of the label itself), I don’t know how we could really know, or even guess. Which is why gnus do what we do — get out there, be noticed, break down stereotypes, and make a safe place for the closet cases to emerge.

I’d need to hear more about the HDS study. “Some degree of belief in x” is not instructive, and it’s not useful to ask them what label they use, since many atheists loathe being called “atheists”.

I’m a bit surprised at the Philosophy results. There is a vibrant strain of theology in analytic epistemology. For example, some of the major names in epistemology — Keith DeRose, Jon Kvanvig, Ernest Sosa, Alvin Plantiga, and so on — are at least part-time theologians. And it’s hardly slipstream stuff — the DeRose/Kvanvig blogCertain Doubts is extremely popular in the online philosophical community. Without looking at the survey data above, I had assumed that theological apologists were the quiet majority, instead of a popular minority.

I’m with Peter N. I’d bet it’s somewhat more than 23.4% due to the closet factor, but still well short of “most.”

Of course, 23.4% is a much bigger number than the proportion of the general American public that is willing to call themselves atheist or agnostic. So in relative terms, academics are still fairly skeptical.

Then, the famous poll of the National Academy of Science identifies a demographic that’s in even (far) better shape.

I wonder whether we (U.S.) lawyers can boast nonbelievers in larger proportion than U.S. academics do. I’m sure we’re nowhere near NAS scientists.

I wonder what the stats would look like if you limited it to the top 50 Universities and the top 30 Liberal Arts colleges in the USA. Not to be condescending, but what happens at Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch is not as important as what happens at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. For example, 100% of current Supreme Court Justices have been selected from these three Universities.

Judging from my own experience in as a lawyer in a large Midwestern metro area that is barely majority-Catholic with a sizeable Baptist minority, I would say that most of my fellow lawyers appear to be believers in belief and they hedge their bets and hide the extent of their doubts or disbelief, because they don’t want to alienate existing or potential clients. There are some who are genuinely devout and who include scripture quotations at the ends of their e-mail messages, right after the “If you received this confidential e-mail by mistake . . .” boilerplate.

When I practiced in New York City, there seemed to be more lawyers who were openly secular, including many secular Jews and lapsed Catholics. I suspect that religiosity among Americans in general is much like religiosity of other Americans who are non-scientists: It’s a “faith” that is 3,000 miles wide and, on average, half an inch deep. How thin is the lip service paid by lawyers to religion? Sometimes it’s as thin as the roast beef at the boarding house.

From Gross and Simmons, “The Religiosity of American University Professors”

TABLE 1 College and University Professors’ Belief in God

Belief in God (Frequency) Percent

I don’t believe in God (138) 9.8

I don’t know whether there is a God (186) 13.1

I do believe in a higher power (271) 19.2

I find myself believing in God some of the time (61) 4.3

While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God (235) 16.6

I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it (495) 34.9

No answer (32) 2.2

(Total 1,417)

Notice the breakdown of responses, including “I do believe in a higher power” (19.2 percent) and “I find myself believing in God some of the time” (4.3) percent—given the scale, those express more agnosticism than “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.”

People who check “I find myself believing in God some of the time” rather than “While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in god” are apparently more doubting than believing.

If we add up not just the (atheists + agnostics), but the higher-power-but-not-god, and (apparently) usually-not-believing in God, we get (9.8 + 13.1) + (19.2 + 4.3) = 22.9 + 23.5 = 46.4 percent.

Almost a quarter don’t simply disbelieve or don’t believe in God, but almost another quarter unsimply don’t believe in “God,” or don’t usually. That’s way higher than the general public.

If we add up the believers-with-some-doubt and the believers-with-no-doubt, we get 51.5 percent.

So just a little more than half of US professors seem to usually believe in something they feel right calling “God.” Almost half don’t, or usually don’t.

This also varies a lot by discipline, and by level of academic achievement.

You find more religiosity in fields like business and education than in philosophy or the sciences, and you find less religiosity the higher you go in science—scientists at better universities are less religious, and top scientists are overwhelmingly irreligious. (E.g., about 93 percent of members of the US National Academy of Sciences and 96 percent of members of the British Royal Society disbelieve in a personal God, and the large majority are outright atheists).

Gross and Simmons (same paper) say:

“Whereas about half of professors in nonreligiously affiliated schools say either that they believe in God despite their doubts or that they have no doubts about God’s existence, this is true of 68.9 percent of professors in religiously affiliated schools. Consistent with previous research, we also find—at least looking at the bivariate distributions—that professors at elite doctoral universities are less likely to be believers than are professors teaching in other kinds of institutions. 36.5 percent of respondents with appointments in elite doctoral schools are either atheists or agnostics, 5 as compared to 15.3 percent of respondents teaching in community colleges, 22.0 percent of those teaching at BA granting institutions, and 22.7 percent of those teaching in nonelitedoctoral granting universities. And whereas about 44.5 percent of community college professors and 38.5 percent of professors at four-year schools say they have no doubt God exists, the same is true for only about 20.4 percent of professors teaching at elite doctoral universities.”

[W]hat happens at Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch is not as important as what happens at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Oh, nonsense. Arguably that’s true for Supreme Court decisions (though I defy you to detect the effects of secular Ivy faculty in the decisions of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, or Alito), but somehow I have the sense that the actions of the hundreds of millions of people in this country who did not attend “the top 50 Universities and the top 30 Liberal Arts colleges in the USA” have a slight effect on our democracy and the lives of the people who live in it. There are in fact numerous “Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch”es (not to mention institutions full of people who never went to college) for every Princeton, and that’s why you’re wrong.

As one rather consequential example, a whole bunch of extremely pious Americans voted for George W. (Yale Harvard) Bush, and oddly enough the (presumably majority) support that Gore and Kerry got from alumni of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t outweigh that. Shockingly. Nor did much of anything that’s good about Yale or Harvard find its way into the Bush 43 presidency.

Come on, Harvard Chaplain Jonathan Figdor. Whether you have any interest in it or not, the portion of America that lies outside of its highest-ranked colleges and universities actually has an overwhelming impact on the world.

– Rieux (who has diplomas from a top-5 liberal arts college and a top-5 law school, FWIW (not much))

It’s all the more so since it’s got nothing whatever to do with my post, so I still don’t see your point. I see what you meant, but not your point. The dispute wasn’t over the claim “most elite academics are atheists”; it was over the claim “most academics everywhere are atheists.” (In context “everywhere” meant at secular schools as well as religious ones, not everywhere in the world.)

Props for going to Harvard and all, but that really wasn’t the subject.

No, I think you mistake my point. My point is that whatever college professors are teaching most people, our society is organized in such a way that elites (particularly when their elitism is in the field of investment banking) have a disproportionate effect on our democracy. Hence, even if the entire bottom 75% of the educational system in this country were to be secular, if the top 25% were biased towards faith, the 25% could maintain their control.

I thought I made it pretty clear that I wasn’t trying to be an elitist jerk by specifically mentioning the Supreme Court. When all of the current members of the Supreme Court come from only 3 school, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, that means that those schools have a DISPROPORTIONATE influence on the future of the Supreme Court.

Also, please don’t accuse me of bragging about going to Harvard here when I actually didn’t say that I went to Harvard in my post (reposted here in full because it was so short): “I wonder what the stats would look like if you limited it to the top 50 Universities and the top 30 Liberal Arts colleges in the USA. Not to be condescending, but what happens at Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch is not as important as what happens at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. For example, 100% of current Supreme Court Justices have been selected from these three Universities.” Certainly I’ve dropped the dreaded H-Bomb other times, but this time, I was just trying to make a reasonable comment about the fact that certain educational institutions have a disproportionate influence over American government.

I thought I made it pretty clear that I wasn’t trying to be an elitist jerk….

Yes, you made that clear. Unfortunately, you succeeded without trying.

My point is that whatever college professors are teaching most people, our society is organized in such a way that elites (particularly when their elitism is in the field of investment banking) have a disproportionate effect on our democracy.

It’s kind of cute how you’re toting those goalposts all over the place, trying to avoid what you actually asserted. “Effect on our democracy”? “Control”? “[I]nfluence on the future of the Supreme Court”? Get started—what you actually said was:

[W]hat happens at Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch is not as important as what happens at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

“Is not as important.” That’s the severely elitist crap you pushed here. Stop trying to dance away from it.

As I pointed out (and you simply ignored), there are hundreds of millions of Americans who have not attended your hallowed Top Schools. These huge numbers of people vote (which makes them and their ideas extremely “important” by any account that isn’t willfully blind), and given that investment banking and the federal government are not actually the only institutions that have “effects” on life in the United States, those millions of people, shockingly, matter.

It just takes breathtaking gall to pretend that presidents and Supreme Court justices are “important” but the combined mass of hundreds of millions of Americans—including the vast majority of officeholders in state governments, a point that has clearly never occurred to you—are not. (How many of the New York legislators who just legalized gay marriage went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton? Or are Fordham University and Albany Law School—whose alumnus, Andrew Cuomo, signed that bill—just as fabulous as those Big Three?)

Prestigious colleges have a disproportionate influence on Americans’ lives. But that’s actually not saying much, considering what a tiny slice of the population said colleges and those (of us) who are their alumni represent. The set of Americans who did not attend Ivy League schools is in fact much more “important” than the set of those who did, because the former is a shitload bigger.

Apparently the view from Cambridge is more than slightly skewed in this respect, but the world does not actually revolve around you folks. And your earlier comment, especially with its ridiculous declaration about “importan[ce],” did in fact pretend that it does.

100% of current Supreme Court Justices have been selected from these three Universities.

And how many of them, or the presidents, are self-identified atheists or agnostics? Harvard, Yale and Princeton are presumably crawling with non-religious academics, relatively speaking, but clearly that hasn’t led to them having a “disproportionate” influence in the US political elite -if anything it’s disproportionately small. The elite institutions have a disproportionate influence in other ways, but how is that relevant to the original subject of the thread?

Isn’t it cute how “most scientists are atheists” equals “science is biased against religion”, but “most scientists are Christians” equals “science and religion are compatible”? Heads I win, tails you lose.

Rieux, no, I think you are the one who is mistaken about being the one who is mistaken…

This is getting silly. My argument is simple. Prestigious Universities and Colleges have a disproportionate influence on American life (this much has been granted). My next argument is that that influence extends beyond the two examples I gave here (the court and the Presidency), to other aspects of American life as well (Lloyd Blankfein, of Goldman Sachs, for example, is a Harvard Alum.). This is not to say that those folks who didn’t attend these schools “don’t matter” (which was never my point, Rieux). But instead, my intention was to show that even though those people should count as much, they aren’t treated as such. You mention that there are millions of them, and then you suggest that their numbers give them power. But in our country, a very very small percentage of our citizens vote in elections. This is how the Republican Party has been able to advocate for policies that directly and deleteriously impact the vast majority of Americans, and still have electoral success. I think democracy is great, but when corporations have the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, the people running those corporations have an ability to disproportionately influence American politics.

So maybe this was a slight tangent (I meant to soothe some fears about the relatively low percentage of college professors who are atheist/agnostic).

In philosophy, we endeavour to give each other charitable readings, to avoid people getting angry about misinterpretations. Maybe this isn’t something to expect from the blogosphere. But when I read your articles and other folks’s comments, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t total morons.

I wonder what the stats would look like if you limited it to the top 50 Universities and the top 30 Liberal Arts colleges in the USA. Not to be condescending, but what happens at Illinois Eastern State Reserve College: Satellite Branch is not as important as what happens at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. For example, 100% of current Supreme Court Justices have been selected from these three Universities.

Jonathan, I think you were mostly clear about what you meant in @11. But you would have been much clearer if it hadn’t been for the joke about Illinois Eastern State Reserve College. I interpreted it as bombast instead of snootery, which is why I initially felt you had gotten your message across. But reasonable people might read it the whole post charitably and still come up with a different interpretation.